4) VFT reconstructions For an insight into the differences between Marx's method of abstraction in the first chapter and VFT abstractions, compare early VFT attempts to reconstruct Marx's starting point (eg Eldred and associates, various 1981-1985). Here the value-form is posited, at the outset, as the money-form derived by Marx as universal equivalent. Further elaboration then establishes the money-form as dominant over the social allocation of labour and it is this dominance over the labour process that 'signifies the transition of the value-form from the sphere of exchange to its domination of bourgeois production' (Eldred and Hanlon, 1981, p.27). The essence of the value-form as the 'mode of association' is that it enables industrial commodities to be produced by concrete dissociated labour. The *contradictory* character of the industrial (capitalist) commodity is thereby established as the universal-particular opposition of abstract associated and concrete dissociated labour: 'To emphasise the value character of the commodity, we refer to it as a product of abstract associated labour, as a universal, as a member of the universe of the industrial commodity-products of labour. By contrast, the commodity as a product of dissociated concrete labour will be referred to as a particularity' (Eldred and Hanlon, 1981, p.29). In place of Marx's reductive derivation, we now have the internal doubling of a concept into 'particularity' and 'universality' referred to by Reuten and Williams (1989) as 'the basic form of internal opposition or contradiction' in dialectical thinking. In a system of private independent production, the basic form of contradiction is 'that dissociated labouring activities only become associated in the exchange of their result, objectified labour, represents the kernel of the contradiction between production and exchange' (Eldred and Hanlon, 1981, p.31). Note that the contradiction inherent in the concept of dissociated labour is not resolved by its negation in exchange; on the contrary, association is a necessary condition enabling the very existence and perpetuation of dissociated activity, given the microeconomic organisation of production and consumption. The necessity of money in this conception seems to be demanded by the value-form (the need for an association of dissociated products and labours) rather than the exchange relation (the need for exchange ratios between commodities). Nevertheless, Eldred, Hanlon Kleiber and Roth (1982) retain the commodity - albeit reconstituted as a duality of money and use-value - as their starting point. Is the commodity sufficiently determinate to act as an all-embracing concept for a specifically capitalist form of wealth? On one reading, the 'commodity' is a preparatory (rather than a universal) notion belonging to the moment of phenomenological inquiry, preceding the presentation proper (Banaji, 1979). Taking Marx's comment on the commodity as an appearance - 'a reflected sphere of the total process of capital' - Banaji argues that the commodity as a concept has 'still to be posited' in its particular-universal doubling of use-value/value (p.30). Note here that Arthur (1997) 'gratefully accepts' this reading, which implies that Capital has a double starting point: (1) the 'commodity' as an analytic category in a preliminary process of inquiry, and (2) 'value' as the synthetic abstract universal starting point for a dialectical presentation. In a comment written shortly before his death, Marx (1879) appears to confirm these readings of the commodity as a preparatory notion and value as the universal capitalist concept: 'In the first place I do not start out from 'concepts', hence I do not start out from 'the concept of value'…What I start out from is that simplest social form in which the labour-product is presented in contemporary society, and this is the 'commodity'. I analyse it, and right from the beginning, in the form in which it appears' (Marx, 1879, p.198). It seems plausible, then, that the first two sections of Capital have to do with empirical/theoretical perceptions and with the process of working these up into concepts. On this reading, the systematic dialectical moment of presentation does not commence until the reconstitution of the commodity as an entity of double (material-social) form, in the third section of the first chapter of Capital. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the ambiguities in Marx's development of the value-form as money-form (a general theory of money?) mitigates against the commodity as an abstract universal for capitalism. But this email is already *far too long* for me to develop the argument for 'dissociated labour' as the most abstract universal concept for the capitalist mode of production (cf. Reuten and Williams, 1989). A one line summary will have to suffice. As a requirement for social cohesion in a system based on the dissociation of labour - and the separation of production and consumption - the interplay of the value-form and the exchange relation constitutes the first moment in which abstract-labour and value are determined as actual. In a nutshell, that is the meaning of form-determination in a systematic dialectical form of logic. Finally. Although I have criticised Marx for the 'failures' of systematic dialectical logic, and praised VFT theories for setting them to rights, this 'critique' should not be taken to imply that I agree with you that the logic of Capital is reductive/analytic/axiomatic. A good case can be made that Capital TAKEN AS A WHOLE is a systematic dialectical work (irrespective of the problems of Chapter 7 or Chapter 1). If one accepts that this is so, then VFT must be seen as a contemporary development as a logic implicit throughout capital, but not always well handled by Marx. Refs to Marx; 1867a, Capital 1, Penguin 1976; 1867b, 'The Value Form' - Appendix to first German edn of Capital 1, reproduced C&C, 1978 (4), 130-150 1857, Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973 1879, Notes on Adolph Wagner, in Carver, 1975. Appologies, for the length of this post Nicky ---------------------------------- Nicola Mostyn (Taylor) Faculty of Economics Murdoch University Australia Telephone: 61-8-9385 1130
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